Be warned
A very good friend once called me an 'ice-cream girl' (ala The Teenage Textbook) - Sweet, but cold.


The Wild Rose
Random Brutal Love Dreamer (RBLD)

Colorful, but unpicked. You are The Wild Rose.

Prone to bouts of cynicism, sarcasm, and thorns, you excite a certain kind of man. Hoping to gather you up, he flirts and winks and asks you out, ultimately professing his love. Then you make him bleed. Why? Because you're the rare, independent, self-sufficient kind of woman who does want love, but not from a weakling.

You don't seem to take yourself too seriously, and that's refreshing. You aren't uptight; you don't over-plan. Romance-wise, sex isn't a top priority--a true relationship would be preferable. For your age, you haven't had a lot of bonafide love experience, though, and this kind of gets to core of the issue. You're very selective.

The problem is them, not you, right? You have lofty standards that few measure up to. You're out there all right, but not to be picked up by just anyone.

"You're never truly single as long as you have yourself."


Link: The Online Dating Persona Test @ OkCupid - free online dating.

the calm before the storm
Tomorrow is the big day. I don't know how to feel. A part of me feels all twisted up in knots, a big worrisome mess. There's limitless information out there...without a fixed syllabus, i could be asked absolutely anything. Yet another part of me feels a strange calm, simply because i know there's nothing much more i can do. I've studied perhaps 80% of what i planned to, maybe it's enough, maybe it's not.. Anyhow, i just have to take a deep breath and plunge right into it. I know i can do it.
I just want it to be over. I'm tired of feeling stressed and tired and lifeless everyday. I want to enjoy life again. I want to have a life again. To spend weekends at the beach, to watch plays in the park, to shop to my heart's content. but most of all, i want to go home.

the final stretch
3 more days to go. Feeling slightly better now that i've finished up a chunk of stuff from BE567. I was feeling thus suffocated and demoralized partly because of non-linear systems, which i took last fall. It was hard grappling with all the equations and definitions that i very quickly chucked out of my memory all those months ago. Oh well, welcome back into my life you confusing Hopf, transcritical, pitchfork, and saddle-node bifurcations. Welcome back all ye wonderful differential equations, vector fields and phase portraits. I would say that my brain is somewhat chaotic right now, except that chaos is defined as aperiodic behavior in a deterministic system that exhibits sensitive dependence on intitial conditions. I don't think that i'm exactly a deterministic system (behavior determined by only the state of system and initial conditions) since several external stresses are currently acting on me and threatening to drive me into a state of insanity (a stable fixed point, which is not possible in a chaotic system).

See, i have been studying. =)

Now that i'm pretty much done with this part of my revision, it's back to physiology and biochemistry, which is much more interesting and also easier to revise. I feel a strange attraction (oooh..i can define a strange attractor too!) towards thick biology textbooks (remember Campbell in JC?)...i actually look forward to having some time to sit down, put on my thinking cap and plough through them. Gonna take a short break to grab some food and water so i don't die a horrible death at home alone.
I can't wait to have a social life again. So many good things lined up for the next month or so. *shoves thoughts away* For now, i'm a hermit! 3 more days to go...

lost
As each day goes by, the feeling grows stronger. In the past month or so, this strange emptiness has taken root in my heart, and it slowly, very slowly gnaws at the core of my being. I don't know what's wrong. But sometimes i just sit there, not motivated to do anything. I am loathe to move, to eat, to enjoy the sunshine. I sometimes feel like life has lost its meaning. Why am i here? Where is the joy in living where i am now? What am i trying to accomplish? I feel lost. Not having anything to look forward to each and everyday except for the day i finish my PhD and return home. Home. So close to my heart, yet so many thousands of miles away. but then again, I'm not ready to go home. I want to live life to the fullest, experience all that i can, and receive the best training in the sciences as possible. Yet, alarms are sounding.. well, not really. Actually, nothing is sounding. It feels likes a vast, empty vacuum yearning to be filled.

I think i'm just tired. Tired of doing it all on my own. Motivating myself, making decisions on what to do, where to go. Seeking out new things to try, meeting new acquaintances but making few lasting friends. Moving from city to city, dealing with any problems that crop up. Exploring a new city, discovering its beautiful secrets but not having anyone to share them with...

It's been five years. I've been away five long years from all the people that matter. I've seen so much and learnt so much that I would never have had I remained in Singapore. But now that I know how much there is out there, and that i've seen how other people lead their lives, comes the realization that so much is lacking in mine...

I've been dealing with so much crap recently. god knows how much money i've wasted in bills, parking tickets, rent and the such. The housing search took freaking long and uncovered some problems with my credit..which leads back to the money issue. Someone put a dent in my car and drove off (i suddenly noticed its appearance one morning). Add to that a broken refrigerator, and worse, clogged kitchen pipes which caused water to backflow into my apartment, flooding the kitchen floor.. gross. This doesn't help my studying for the PhD quals, which is scheduled for next week. Too many shitty things at once makes xiao an unhappy person.

I need to change my attitude before i screw up the exam. Everyday i sit in front of the computer (as i am now), willing myself to study, but not moving an inch towards the books. There's so much more to study.. right now, i feel like doomsday is approaching, but i'm not doing anything to salvage the situation. Ha. I feel like yelling at myself to "WAKE UP!"

But i have faith that everything will be better soon. Thanks to Kat, i feel like I have some semblance of a personal life. Thanks for involving me in your life, and for sacrificing some of your precious 'alone time'. Also, boon will soon be in Boston for a visit, and i'll be more than happy to show her around boston. Then comes a much awaited trip back home. A chance to spend some quality time with family and friends and really recharge my draining energy. Perhaps most importantly, D will be flying back to the US with me....a dream come true.

Give me a month to bounce back. Life will be good again. Hear me roar.

crossroads
It's an amazing feeling, being with someone 24/7 for three months, yet loving every single day of it. It's quite unbelievable that in slightly over a week i'll be leaving Leipzig, and returning to Singapore. Time has gone by in a blink of an eye. A part of me is glad - I miss my grandparents, parents, friends and food =). I want to see how much my baby cousin has grown, and i don't want to miss his first steps and first words. But most of me is sad - I think of the laughter, the tears, the smiles, the hugs, the kisses, the sunsets, the walks, the knowing looks ...and I know how hard it'll be to walk away from what we have shared in the past few months. Well, there's not much more to say about this... we'll just have to prepare ourselves once again for being apart. We should be used to it by now, considering we have 4 yrs of experience behind us. =P But it's never easy...damned heart.

Sunday already?
Back in a familiar life surrounded by dear relatives and old friends, and the US one quickly fades into the background. But the blogs, the emails and the news reports serve as a reminder that life, whether I am present or not, continues to move at the same unrelenting pace. New friendships are forged, old ones strengthed, new places are explored, old haunts revisited. Whether i am in Singapore or in California, time, people, life, goes on. And when i return to one place from the other, i am frustrated by all that i have missed out on. 7 Months. The sudden deepening of my cousin's voice came as a shock. My aunt's swelling tummy, a surprise, since she showed no signs of pregnancy the last time i left. My other aunt's broken foot - no one told me. Friends, with new boyfriends/girlfriends, entering the workforce for the first time. Not large significant changes, but little subtle ones that make me feel displaced and ever so detached....unable to put down my roots in any one place.

Where the hell has all that time gone?!
well, my mundane life has simply been jam-packed with a ton things ever since graduation. Where and how should i start posting again? I've been considering pulling the plug on this oft neglected blog...especially after comparing it to all the beautiful stylo webpages that everyone else seems to have. Boo! I wish mine were chio too. Although my blog fails to serve any aesthetic purpose, it is the one window that friends miles away have to my little life. Especially because i'm becoming so damn antisocial.
Seriously, i can hardly recall going out in a group larger than three in the past month or so. I build walls, i keep to myself, i don't well, socialize. I hate being so closed off to people. but at the same time, I like being alone. I like knowing that i can do any damn thing i wish, whether it's digging my nose or making stupid faces, not that i actually do such things. ;)
Guess i'll start blogging bits and pieces of the past few months.....little fragments of the wonderful summer that i have had. Post-graduation life had always looked so unsettlingly uncertain, but thanks to a few great people and lucky twists of fate, it's worked out just great. Many thanks to whoever is out there looking out for me...

fire in the sky
Living near Moeser Lane made it possible to catch yesterday's spectacular fireworks across the bay, even though it took 5 minutes of muffled 'booms' to make lazy ol' me leave the house. The annual KFOG KaBoom was one of the longest displays i have ever seen. Forget about the waaaaaaay short Singapore National Day fireworks. This one must have been close to 15 minutes! Just imagine the money they spent. I didn't take pictures though...just grabbed my car keys and raced up the hill. After the fireworks, there was a grand line of cars chugging down Moeser Lane. Somehow i thought it was pretty funny.
i miss him the most not when i'm upset, or having a bad day. It's when i'm really happy, or see something nice that i feel the great distance between us. I'm looking forward to the day where we can actually live our lives together, and the emptiness will be a thing of the past.

trading spaces, changing rooms
mood: what do you think?
a nice blast of humid, hot air. The first thing to greet me upon my arrival at Changi. yippee. The flight was not too bad. i rather enjoyed the turbulence...the kind that jiggles your cup (filled of course, with orange juice that threatens to slosh all over you) around the tray. It reminds me that i'm somewhere high above the clouds, sitting in a huge hunk of metal powered by uncomfortably tiny engines. Looking out of the window at night, the whirring man-made engines look strangely 'unnatural' against the sky and the blanket of clouds. Like they shouldn't be there at all. It's a miracle, i think, to be on a plane with 200 hundred other people, thousands of feet in the sky. And surreal, to have the stars shining down on you, unwaveringly following you across cities, countries, continents and oceans, as though they were guiding you to a final, safe destination. Well, that's what i tell myself at least. And the rainbow. As the plane left Taipei, i was staring out of the window, wanting to arrive in Singapore real bad. And then suddenly there it was.....not a tiny, faint now-you-see-it-now-you-don't rainbow, but a huge big in-your-face rainbow, the kind that you want EVERYONE to know about. It formed a very pretty multi-coloured halo. i remember thinking: Richard Of York Gave Birth In Vain = Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. Hmm.. how do you remember the colours of the rainbow? Yar. that settled me down a bit, and i conked out for the next 2 hours. =) i sat next to someone who knew some berkeley friends, and who was headed to singapore to visit his girlfriend. good conversation, pretty much by chance since we both made some seat changes. So, time flew by and he got to see my baby bolster and my ugly sleeping face. poor guy.
So that was that. Now that i'm on solid ground and 'home', i feel traces of apprehension about coming back. That strange feeling of having been suddenly displaced, and shoved into this whole new life. I start calling/emailing/contacting friends, unpacking, replacing all the US stuff in my wallet with singapore ones, getting used to the people around you. I feel like a little bird, flittering around and then suddenly returning to the nest it was born, and starting life there all over again. Then, one day, just as it starts looking and feeling more like the home it knows so well, it flies off again, and things change. I know i will start feeling less this way soon. But it's different this time though, coz he'll probably be in New York with the guys, coz he's not around for me to talk to whenever i want to, coz singapore seem that much emptier without him. But i'm not sad or anything. I hope he gets to new york and has a fantastic time. And for me, i can't wait to catch up with old friends, and meet new ones. What's irritating, is having to leave things hanging in the air. Then coming back the next time and trying to pick up from where i left off.
Oh well, no major complaints though. I've spoken to a couple of close friends, and we got all excited about meeting up (sushi buffet and windsurfing, here i come!). Also, i really want to visit my parents in malaysia. Plus, seeing my grandparents' faces light up....priceless. =) yep. don't complain, don't complain. =)